230061 Confronting Multiple Inequalities: Social Movements of the 1960s in Mexico and the US (BS) (SoSe 2018)

The course will focus on the interventions by multiple social movements that radically intervened and changed societies in the US and Mexico in the 1960s. The first part of the course focuses mainly on the US context, were most prominently the Civil Rights Movement fought against racial segregation and oppression. Following the anti-authoritarian movements of previous eras, and against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy, and communist hunt and nuclear threat related to the Cold War, the social movements of the 1960s worked towards rethinking and redefining the direction of US American and other societies and contributed to the emergence to a broad spectrum of countercultural practices and phenomena. Examining a number of original texts (speeches, pamphlets, poems, documents) as well as films from or representing the 1960s, this part of the course will also discuss the activities, practices and effects and impact of the feminist and Chicano and Chicana movements as well as the lesbian and gay movement.
The second part of the course will concentrate on “Mexico: during the Global Sixties (c.1956-c.1976).” It will pay particular attention to the 1968 student movement and the radicalism that emerged in the 1970s in response to state repression.

1st part: tba

2nd part:

June 27: Introduction to the “Global Sixties (c.1956-c.1976)” and Mexico during this period.
July 4: Youth radicalism in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution
July 11: 1968, Part I: The movement
July 12: 1968, Part II: The Reaction
July 18: Student activism during Echeverría’s: “democratic opening”
July 19: Guerrilla uprisings and non-violent responses to State Repression